It is nice,
I guess, that a few commentators and politicians are finally starting to
question the wisdom of “flattening the curve,” but where were they six weeks
ago? Four weeks ago? Last week?
It’s
not like the basics of the strategy were concealed from us. “Flattening the curve” always meant spreading
out the incidence of corona infections over a longer period of time, not
reducing the overall number of infections or deaths. The horrific vision presented to us was that
our doctors and nurses and hospitals would be facing an enormous number of
cases all at once, would be overwhelmed by the task, and would not have enough
manpower or equipment (e.g., ventilators) to help all those stricken. By spreading it out over months, there was a
hope (more hinted at than expressed), that those who fell ill would get better
treatment and that some of them would survive who otherwise might not. There was also a possibility (again, rarely
stated), that delaying the onset of some cases might allow time for new
treatments or a vaccine to be developed, so that those whose crisis was delayed
by flattening the curve would have a better chance of survival. No promises, you understand, but that was the
idea.
The
price to be paid for this flattening was not discussed at all, though it
quickly became clear it would be large. Rapidly,
as increasing numbers of cases were trumpeted on television and on the
internet, the screws were tightened.
“Large gatherings” were banned, and that was the end of baseball and
basketball and hockey and tennis and golf and collegiate sports and concerts
and theaters and weddings, and backyard parties and schools and colleges and
bowling leagues. Then restaurants and
bars were shut down. Then all
“non-essential” businesses, parks, beaches, walking trails, swimming pools,
basketball courts, and so on.
As all
this was happening, where was the public discussion? Where were the debates? Where was the Senate? The House of Representatives? State legislatures? Where was there even a single soothing,
rational voice suggesting that the benefits of flattening the curve needed to
be weighed against the costs? Where was
Ted Cruz or Rand Paul or Mitch McConnell or Rush Limbaugh or Ben Shapiro? Or anybody?
Where was there a voice pointing out that there was no evidence
flattening the curve would reduce the toll of the virus, and that putting 30
million people out of work and destroying tens of thousands of businesses would
kill a certain large, predictable number of innocent human beings, so maybe we
should take a day or two to think about what we were doing?
There
are lots of people and lots of politicians who want to think lockdowns will
save lives, but there was never any evidence that flattening the curve would
reduce the suffering and death produced by the coronavirus. How could there be, since limiting the number
of cases was never the purpose, and since shutting down an entire society and
an entire economy had never been tried before?
As we are learning, there still is no evidence that the lockdowns are
working to reduce the effects of the virus, despite the press’s hysterical
condemnation of American states or other countries (e.g,, Sweden), that decided
to rely on the self-regulating processes of men acting freely and cooperatively
rather than invoke the heavy boot of edicts and orders and snitch-lines and policemen.
A study
was published April 8 by the Israeli National Council for Research and
Development by its Director, Isaac Ben-Israel, indicating that the virus has
followed a constant pattern across many countries, regardless of the response
of the government:
“It turns out that a
similar pattern---rapid increase in infections that reaches a peak in the sixth
week and declines from the eighth week---is common to all countries in which
the disease was discovered, regardless of their response policies: some imposed
a severe and immediate lockdown that included not only “social distancing” and
banning crowding, but also an economic shutdown (like Israel); some “ignored”
the infection and continued almost a normal life (such as Taiwan. Korea or
Sweden), and some initially adopted a lenient policy but soon reversed to a
complete lockdown (such as Italy or the State of New York). Nonetheless, the data shows similar time constraints amongst all these countries in
regard to the initial rapid growth and the decline of the disease.”
This is what has happened, and is happening, in Italy,
Germany, France, Austria, Sweden, the UK, the USA and Israel. The numbers of new infections follow the same pattern everywhere.
In
other words, the benefits of flattening the curve are still largely
theoretical, as they have been from the beginning. Will some be saved by spreading out the
stress on the healthcare system?
Maybe. Will the delay in the
onset of the disease for some allow time for life-saving treatments to be
discovered? It’s possible.
But the
costs of flattening the curve are
real and substantial and do not depend on computer models. We know that poverty kills, through
homelessness, substance abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence, poor health,
and suicide. And we know that when
unemployment rises from 3.7% in 2019 to 30% in 2020, people will die. All these correlations in mortality have been
studied for decades. For an individual,
unemployment increases the risk of premature death from all causes by 63%
(approximately, of course---different studies produce slightly different results). Every person thrown out of work by our
governments is put at risk.
I’m not
going to attempt to present you with a number of deaths that the strategy of
flattening the curve will cause. I
wouldn’t know how to do so, and the uncertainties attached to such a
calculation would make it irresponsible to present any such number.* But let’s just look at just one cause of
death and its links to unemployment.
The
link between unemployment and suicide has been known for decades, and the rule
of thumb usually cited is that for every 1% increase in the rate of unemployment, the number of suicides goes up by 1%. Based on this formula, an article in the
British Journal of Psychiatry concluded that the economic crisis in 2007-8
produced an additional 4750 suicides in the United States. In the world of suicidologists and others who
study such things, this was a completely non-controversial
finding.
Suicide
is the tenth leading cause of death in the U.S. most years, and in 2017 (a
“normal” year for U.S. suicides), this meant that 47,000 Americans killed
themselves. If, by flattening the curve
in 2020, we increase the unemployment rate
by 25% (from 3.7% to somewhere near 30%), we will increase the number of suicides by 25%. That 25%, applied to a “normal” suicide total
of 47,000, means there will be an additional 11,750 self-inflicted deaths this
year. And that will be only part of the
cost directly attributable to flattening the curve. I’m not even estimating the number of people
who will drink themselves to death or be killed by their spouses or by other
opportunistic infections or medical problems that don’t get treated. (We are beginning to hear plenty of stories
about people who die at home from heart attacks, strokes or other serious
problems because they were afraid to go to a hospital or did not know where
they could get treatment in an emergency.)
There
is an additional cost we may pay by shutting down society and flattening the
curve, though at the moment, we can only speculate on how large it may be. This is the issue of herd immunity.
Normally,
when a very contagious disease sweeps through a population, everyone who survives
it emerges with antibodies that protect them from being re-infected. Eventually, so many people have these
antibodies that the disease becomes unable to “find” new victims and sustain
its presence in the community. It becomes
dormant. It may re-appear a hundred
years later (e.g., the Black Plague), to attack an entirely new population, but
the people who survive the first epidemic, even
the ones who never got the disease and developed the antibodies, are safe. The herd has become immune.
By
flattening the curve, we may be interrupting this natural process and allowing
our population to remain vulnerable to coronavirus indefinitely. It may come back, in other words. In fact, it may become endemic, meaning that
it never goes away.
Anticipating
the screams from my critics, let me point out I am not recommending that
everyone intentionally get infected, and I am NOT suggesting you take your
cancer-ridden 86-year-old grandpa to an NBA game. Keep him home and protect him. But it is a wonderful thing for everyone if a
large proportion of the population gets the virus and develops the antibodies
and doesn’t die. If we can achieve herd
immunity, we may not see the damn thing again for a long time. This is why the most short-sighted thing we
have done is close schools and colleges.
The chance of children and 20-year-olds dying from coronavirus is almost
zero, and the advantage of having an immune population for the next sixty or
seventy years is immense. Besides, if we
don’t expose healthy young people to the possibility of coronavirus, what do we
do next year when it comes back? Unless
we plan to close schools forever, it was foolish to do so now.
(There’s
even a more important reason not to close schools, which is that quarantining
healthy people puts them at risk. It is
only by regular exposure to germs that we build a strong immune system. Isolation only weakens and degrades the
protection that our bodies achieve by fighting off microorganisms. There is a hilarious, and true, YouTube video
of George Carlin describing how swimming in the Hudson River’s raw sewage as a
child protected him for life from the ordinary run of diseases.)
I am
writing this article to present the argument that “flattening the curve” by
shutting down schools and businesses and locking everyone in their homes will
kill far more people than simply educating the public and suggesting measures
people might take to protect themselves and, especially, the most vulnerable
among us. To me, it has been clear from
the first moment that the strategy would have lethal effects and that it was
the sort of bone-headed idea that only lifelong bureaucrats and other
politicians drunk on power could come up with.
After all, it was never supposed
to save lives and it was never supposed
to reduce infections. The only purpose
was to render the cases we were destined to encounter easier to deal with. And the cost?
Many thousands of innocent lives and a return to the privations of the
Great Depression, only worse.
But
what if I were wrong? What if Isaac Ben-Israel and the Israeli NCRD is wrong? What if locking
down America to flatten the curve did save some lives? What if people were saved because peak demand
was reduced at critical moments and we had the resources to save everyone who
was savable? What if innovative
treatments emerged that rescued some of those who got the virus later on, and
who got the virus later only because we had flattened the curve? And what if the herd immunity issue turned
out to be a non-issue? What if
flattening the curve saved enough lives to balance out the buckets of blood and
treasure we would pay by shutting down society?
Who
would benefit from this grand bargain?
Assuming the flattening of the curve would NOT cost more lives, who
would it serve?
Well,
the first group of beneficiaries would be the health care establishment,
especially the government healthcare establishment represented most prominently
by 52-year bureaucrat Anthony Fauci. What
was the result of choosing the absurdly catastrophic computer models relied on
by Fauci, our government, the news media, and left-wing governors around the
country? New hospitals! A hundred thousand new beds! We need 50,000 ventilators! Let’s park a hospital ship in New York
Harbor!
The
beds? Well, never mind. The ventilators? Well, let’s just put them in a warehouse---I
know we’ll need them really soon! And
the Hospital Ship Comfort? Back to
Virginia, matey. Ahoy!
But
that’s just money being pissed away, something the governments in America do
every second of every day. Down the drain, yes, but it’s just money. It’s what you get when you allow doctors and
scientists to make government policy, and there’s a lesson to be learned there,
but that’s a discussion for another day.
But it’s
the other tradeoff that’s more troubling and more sinister. Forget the money being wasted. Let’s look at the lives this strategy will
cost. And for that calculation, let’s
assume there are lives to be saved from flattening the curve. Let’s assume there are a lot of them. Let’s assume there are ten thousand people
saved by the lockdowns and the panic and the end of our freedom to make a buck,
go to the beach, eat in a restaurant, and see a baseball game. Who are they? Who gets saved? Well, guess what? It’s Woodstock Nation. The most optimistic scenario for “flattening
the curve” is that it will extend the lives of ten thousand Boomers (and some who
are older), for an additional five or ten years.
They
will pay no price for this, of course, or not much of one. They won’t lose their jobs because they don’t
have jobs. They are doing fine on their
pensions and 401(k)s and other investments and Social Security. Those who ran businesses gave them up a while
ago. Some of them will pine for the
Stanley Cup playoffs but, hey, we all have to make sacrifices.
So who will pay the price?
Well, remember
the suicides? And the addiction and the
homelessness and the unemployment? The
price for extending all those Boomer lives for a few years will be paid by the Millennials
and the Gen-X crowd. They are the thirty
million unemployed. They are the
entrepreneurs losing their dreams, and all their savings, right now. They are the divorces. And for the ones who actually die in this
meltdown (and we know they will,
though we will never know their names), they are the ones who had every reason
to expect fifty or sixty more years of happy, prosperous life. But to protect the elderly and those near death, the young must be sacrificed.
This is
the bottom line for flattening the curve.
It is the farewell present from the Me-Generation to their children and
grandchildren. Saving the lives of the
elderly by trading them for the lives of those forty years younger is the final,
most narcissistic, binge of the Boomers.
Copyright2020MichaelKubacki
* I will leave that sort
of “science” to the Dr. Fauci’s of the world.
On March 11 of this year, Fauci famously testified to Congress that the
fatality rate for coronavirus cases (a subject on which he had virtually NO
information), was ten times that of the seasonal flu. As we have learned since, it now appears that
Fauci’s fatality rate was too high by a factor of a hundred.
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